In 1965, after his Nietzsche and philosophy, Gilles Deleuze was asked to make an introduction to Nietzsche as part of a collection of introduction to philosophy. The fruit is this book, virtuous sum of three inspired texts and a selection no less successful of long fragments of the great untimely thinker.
The first part covers the Life of Nietzsche as if it were a story, which highlights the unique way that adopts at each step the relationship between health and illness (the art of moving between them) and madness (the inability to continue that displacement) , but at the same time the fact that madness, although it signals its end, is an internal element of the work.
The second part goes through the Philosophy of Nietzsche as if it were a body. A body that is perverted, or that perverts whoever contacts it. From this perversion new images of thought will emerge, some more from Nietzsche, others from Deleuze, always mixtures.
A third part summarizes the main characters of Nietzsche, from Ariadna to Zarathustra, going through all types of men and Dionysus, as well as his famous bestiary -asno, eagle, snake, spider, lion, child- to reveal the significance of each one in the plot of his thought.
Finally, Deleuze shows the fragments that for him are most expressive of the enormous Nietzschean corpus, and of his own perverted reading.